


when you're livin' our dream

by philthestone



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, anyway, look at these losers slowly becoming friends, pre-canon fic, rated for mild language and also guns, theyve known each other for eight years and i cry periodically thinking about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5767069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're a terrible partner," she tells him, voice firm and lips pinched, one night four weeks in on a stakeout in his candy wrapper-filled car. "I know," he says, grinning at the windshield.</p><p>It's not true, not at all, but Amy decides that his acknowledgement of it has to mean <em>something</em>, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you're livin' our dream

**Author's Note:**

> i'm completely in love with the fact that jake and amy have been partners for the past eight years, so _of course_ I had to write fic about the tension early early on in their relationship. 
> 
> More extensive notes at the end, but: title's from Everything Is Awesome (the only TLI-affiliated song i'll listen to willingly, tbh. oops), AAAAND reviews are GREATLY loved by all!!!

Generally, Amy hates hospitals.

Which doesn’t make much sense, because they have clean white walls and are usually-organized and smell like hand sanitizer. In theory, Amy should have no qualms against hospitals.

But the cleanliness is sterile and lifeless, and the organization feels dehumanizing, and the particular brand of hand sanitizer that hospitals use, Amy thinks, is overwhelmingly chemical-y, sticking to the back of her throat and making her head ache.

 _Like they’ve never even heard of Bath and Body Works_ , Peralta had once interjected, overhearing her express her hospital vendetta to Sergeant Jeffords – his voice sing-song and his eyes laughing. Amy had thrown a pen at him in an extremely unprofessional manner and then apologized profusely to the Sarge, and her idiot partner had laughed.

He always seems to be laughing.

Amy’s not sure if that’s because he’s always laughing _at her_ , of if Peralta just naturally, biologically, genetically has no idea what is and is not an appropriate time for joking around.

“So, I was thinking of getting a bird,” he’s saying. “Like maybe a parrot? Parrots can talk to you, man, that is like, _so awesome!_ Hey, dude number two – yeah, with the – the earring, thing, okay that’s a little cool but – in your professional opinion, sir, do you think that I could teach a parrot to quote _Die Hard?_ ”

Peralta’s wrist is brushing against her own, their hands suspended above their heads in the stale back-alley air. Amy thinks that if she doesn’t count the spilled coffee that morning, the five-block marathon after the assholes in front of them, and the constant sound of Peralta’s non-stop babbling in her ear – then, if she stretched it, her day has been pretty overall decent. Maybe.

(No, she thinks, sighing internally. She forgot about the fact that her mascara was all gross and clumpy when she tried to apply it that morning.)

“A parrot?” says guy number two – who _does_ have an earring in his left lobe, though Amy’s not entirely sure what about it qualifies as _cool_. His thick eyebrows have lowered on his forehead. “Parrots shit everywhere,” he says, mincing no words; his voice is gravelly. “My Gran had one, it was hell. Dust and feathers and shit, _everywhere_.”

“Good to know,” says Peralta from beside her, smiling and nodding and looking deeply contemplative. His cheeks are flushed from their run in the crisp October air, and Amy can see the sweat curling his hair at the temples out of the corner of her eye. He’s still breathing hard, and she feels a small measure of satisfaction in the fact that she herself is barely winded. _Take_ that, _‘Lucky Charms and orange soda are part of a wholesome nutritious breakfast_ ’. “Now,” he continues, with renewed gravitas, “would the possibility of Parrot Bruce Willis outweigh the cons of bird crap everywhere, is the real question, gentlemen.”

“Oh, shut up,” says guy number one. “Jesus, _shut up._ ”

Amy swallows and inhales, shoulders straightening even further, glaring.

She doesn’t much like using hyperboles or oft-quoted proverbs, but.

Well.

If there was ever a time to say, “everything’s gone up hot water creak and we have no paddles,” now is that time. It’s six fifty on a Thursday evening. Her coffee spilled all over her paperwork and favorite boots twenty minutes into her shift. She’s been enduring her loud-mouthed, disorganized partner for maybe all of five months.

And everything’s gone way up hot water creek without any semblance of paddles in their general vicinity, _or,_ in this case: they don’t have their guns, and guns are being pointed _at_ them, and everything pretty much sucks.

“Hey, man,” Peralta’s saying easily into the barrel of the small handgun. “You don’t like parrots, that’s cool. I promise I won’t take it personally. More importantly, I won’t even arrest you! Just let us go, and we’ll leave, and you guys, like, move to the Bahamas. I’ve heard the Bahamas are great this time of year, super criminal vacation hot spot with _zero_ parrots –”

Amy snorts, a reflex that she can’t seem to stop. The gunmen look decidedly unimpressed; guy number two, with the cool earring and thick eyebrows, snaps his gum.

(She can’t remember where she read it, but she’s _sure_ there are parrots in the Bahamas.)

“And no one gets hurt, right?” Peralta finishes. “That’s a cool idea. Don’t you think that’s a cool idea? I’m a genius.”

Suspended in the air, his wrist nudges hers, just barely. The sore spot on her arm where one of the guys grabbed her gun hand and twisted is twinging painfully. Amy’s eyes flick over, but Peralta’s still looking straight at the perps and grinning in what she assumes is supposed to be a winning fashion. She swallows against the groan building up in her throat. The perps, she’s sure, would sympathize with her groaning, probably, if they weren’t pointing guns in her face.

Fantastic.

“Seriously?” snarls guy one. Guy two nods in agreement. It’s difficult to miss, seeing as the second guy is much bigger than the first, and also standing right beside him. “You’re cops, asshole. We’re not letting you go.”

He’s taken a step forward, and his blackened finger is resting on the trigger of the gun. Of course, Amy’s dealt with this kind of situation before. She’s been _trained_ for this, drilled for this, knows how to talk down a gun in her face and keep her cool in a situation.

But guns can only be so close to chests when neither of them are wearing their vests before something in Amy’s midriff clenches.

“Look,” Amy snaps in her most authoritative voice (she took a seminar, once, on authoritative voices. Obviously, she was right in saying that it was going to be useful one day), “you’re not gaining anything by keeping us here. Let us go and nobody gets hurt. You don’t want _assault_ to go on your record when we’re after you for a botched B and E.”

There’s a moment, thick and heavy; Amy feels her weight shift to the tips of her toes. _Please please please please please –_

The first guy takes a step towards her, close enough that Amy feels the hairs on her forearms raise of their own accord. He shifts his weight to one hip, leaning in even further, gun in hand and pointed at her chest, and it’s hardly the most menacing thing she’s ever seen, but Amy stiffens on impulse when the guy grins.

It’s the last straw on the metaphorical, crippled disaster of a camel’s back that’s made up her day, and Amy’s jaw tightens before she speaks without thinking.

(She hates speaking without planning what she’s going to say, she thinks, a split second before the brittle words lash out on her tongue; it never comes out right, and half the time, her phrasing is awkward, or she loses track of what she wanted to say halfway through her sentence, or she just plain embarrasses herself.)

(But.)

“Back. _Off_.”

The guy’s grin widens, shoulders easing up. The gun is still trained on her chest, Amy is hyperaware, roughly three inches away and she has absolutely no way of turning to the side without it posing as a huge risk. “Aw, _sweetheart_ –”

(Drawled and almost-feral and God if Amy hasn’t heard that same tone a _million_ times before, _God_ if the condescension that laces the undercarriage of his words hasn't lapped at her from every corner around her ever since that day she told Tommy Everhart in the ninth grade she was planning on running for debate team president. It’s overused and stale and Amy’s used to it, but here, in this moment, there’s also a gun pointed at her chest, and –)

“ _Hey_.”

Amy feels her breath catch in her throat. 

She’s only known Peralta for maybe five months – five months of sitting across from him in the precinct, wrinkling her nose at the candy wrappers that always seem to sneak over the desk divide onto her side, at the stack of crumpled papers spilling over the edges of his desk, at the sticky Rubix cubes and the broken Darth Vader bobblehead and the way he always flicks eraser shavings at her when he thinks she’s not looking. She’s heard him whine about paperwork, and sing nonsense made-up songs under his breath, and groan in frustration, protest loudly at any manner of things, do terrible Sylvester Stallone impersonations – she’s even heard him, exhausted and angry, drilling a perp they’d brought in for suspected dealings with a child trafficking ring at twelve-thirty at night.

She has never, _ever_ heard his voice with that strain of ice-cold steel in it.

“Are you deaf? She said back off.”

Guy one’s head whips around to look at him.

Amy blinks and wonders if she misheard his previous statement; his voice has gone back to normal, even if it does have a tiny bit of an edge to it – a lot closer to the easy, gentle timbre that Amy’s used to. Peralta’s hands are still in the air, barely a hair's breadth between his jacket sleeve and Amy's, and he shrugs his shoulders at the guy.

“Oh, yeah?” says the perp. 

Amy’s eyes flick over to guy two’s gun, pointed at Peralta’s solar plexus, and wonders if she can somehow communicate _don’t do anything stupid_ via subtle wrist-nudge, or maybe telepathy. She’s heard of partners on the field who’ve known each other so long, who work together so well that they can practically read each other’s’ thoughts. There are _legends_ , Amy thinks. Dynamic duos. 

And as much as she appreciates the fact that the guy isn’t leering at her anymore, if Peralta’s gonna pull some dumbass chivalry bull crap when they’re standing in a back alley with guns pointed at them at the end of a _pathetically_ bad day, Amy’s going to have some things to say. 

(She swallows against the frustration that licks at the pit of her stomach, and it has very little to do with the gun pointed at her stomach and everything to do with the transfer request forms hidden in her desk.)

“Seriously, man,” Peralta says again. “Not cool. Don’t be a creep.”

“Just let us _go_ ,” adds Amy, her shoulders still tense, and she’s glad to hear that her voice is still steady and strong. 

Beside her, Peralta nods. “That, too, is a genius plan. We’re _both_ geniuses. Except I’m more of a genius, but – _dude_ , what the _hell_.”

Right as Amy says, “ _I will break your fingers_ ,” and guy two’s fingers still centimeters away from Amy’s shirt. Her eyes have narrowed down on the dark, scratched muzzle of the gun, can trace the slivers of silver around the mouth of the barrel, the sleek matte form, down to where the perp’s finger the resting on the trigger. Her heart rate has increased of its own accord, and her brain is mapping all the possible ways she could twist out of the way without getting shot somewhere vitally important.

And then:

“What the hell’re _you_ gonna do about it, huh?”

The question is directed to Peralta, and Amy wonders, briefly - nearly rolling her eyes - whether all perps go to some sort of Cliché Action Movie School. Or maybe, it’s just the influence of some Universal Stupidity, somewhere, intent on screwing with her at the worst possible moments. Technically, the asshole is _right_ , because, once again, there are _guns_ pointed at their _unprotected chests_ , but the sentiment is still frustrating. She wonders if Peralta is just as unimpressed with the Awful Action Movie Line as she is, and she turns, almost reflexively, to gauge his reaction.

She realizes a millisecond before he opens his mouth that everything’s about to go from bad to far, far worst.

“Probably something stupid,” says Peralta, and he grabs the gun pointed towards him around the slide and yanks.

** 

Amy hates hospitals, so it would only figure that her terrible, awful, no-good day would be followed up the next morning by Amy perching on the edge of a hospital bed.

“Omigosh, okay,” says Peralta. “Are those the juicy berry gummies that they sell at the big department stores? Because if they are, Santiago, I think I might love you.”

“You do realize,” says Amy, “that if the gunshot had been a _half an inch_ to the right –”

“Santiago,” he says, interrupting her, his eyes somehow still laughing through the spectacular black eye decorating the right side. “Let’s talk about the important things, here. Candy. In your hands. For me.”

Amy purses her lips. “You don’t know that they’re for you.”

Peralta’s chest seems to deflate. “Oh.”

Amy rolls her eyes and tosses the bag of hard candies at him, deliberately ignoring the big grin that lights up his face as he catches it.

“It’s hard candy,” Amy says, crossing her arms over her chest, and frowns at him. “And you’re an idiot.”

“False,” says Peralta, eyeing one of the more brightly-coloured candies and popping it into his mouth. “I’m the best cop in Brooklyn.”

“You could’ve gotten us _both_ killed –”

“But I didn’t, though,” he says around the candy in his cheek, looking up at her earnestly, brown eyes big and wide. “You had my back.”

It’s … not exactly true, but. Amy huffs a sigh and tightens her arms around her torso, fingers curling into the fabric of her hoodie; the Sarge gave them both the day off, told Amy to get some rest, and she heard him _ordering_ Peralta to stay in bed for at least a day over the phone.

(She's not sure if McGinely knows or cares that Peralta got injured. It leaves a funny taste in her mouth.)

She crosses her legs and turns his words over in her head, chewing on her lip. The larger of the two perps got away, disappearing into the dappled twilight shadows of the back alley, but Amy had managed to almost break the first guy’s jaw and cuff him before her partner’s face got any more black and blue decorations. The weapons had skittered to the ground about two seconds after Peralta made the grab for guy one's gun, and Amy hates to think of what might have happened if he’d been a second slower. Her own jaw is still a little sore, and she thinks her wrist might be sprained - but she remains perched on the corner of the hospital bed, watching Peralta dig through her bag of expensive rock candies, pushing away the traitorous thoughts in the back of her head that are insisting that he _knew_ that by distracting the larger guy, he would be giving her the opening to take down the skeaze.

“It was irresponsible. There was no way I knew what you were thinking.”

His eyes flick back up to her from the bag, and a small, fleeting crease appears between his eyes before he turns back to the candy and shrugs.

“These things aren’t half bad, Santiago.”

She purses her lips, tries not to be annoyed by how blatantly he’s ignoring her chastisement. It irritates her more than she cares to admit, how sometimes he dismisses her concerns with such – such _little_ finesse, like she’s not even worth his trying to be graceful about it. There’s something, though, this time - something about the crease that appeared between his eyebrows and the way the mottled red and purple splotches ringing his cheek make him look just a little bit pathetic, that makes Amy bite her tongue. She says instead,

“How’s your face?”

He grins, which she thinks should not be a thing, considering he totally lived up to his word and did something amazingly stupid. Slammed into a brick wall, cracked two ribs and decorated with one of the most beautiful black eyes Amy’s ever seen - all because he opened his big mouth. What rankles her _most_ is that she can’t even find it within herself to be truly pissed off at him; it _wasn’t_ some dumb chivalry thing, in the end – not really. If anything, he timed it precisely so that Amy had enough time to disarm the guy in front of her, distracted for a moment too long – to knock his gun to the ground, drive her knee into his midriff.

More like a solid show of partnership than anything else.

(Amy pushes the image of the transfer forms in her desk and the memory of Peralta’s loud voice declaring that he doesn’t _need_ a partner to the back of her mind, tries not to twist her fingers into the fabric of her pants too much.)

He grins, and says, “Ruggedly handsome and oozing with charm?”

Amy makes a face at him, wrinkling her nose _no_ , and they lapse into an odd sort of silence that’s broken by his fumbling with the plastic candy package intermittently. Neither of them says anything until he sticks the candy into the side of his cheek:

“Y’know, I was being serious when I said these things are actually pretty good.”

Amy frowns.

“Of course they are. I have excellent taste.”

“Debatable,” Peralta says, grinning a little again. His tongue is stained red already. “Loser.”

“ _You’re_ a loser,” says Amy, before she can stop herself.

“Your _face_ is a loser –”

“Just – stop. Please.”

“ _Loser_ ,” he whispers, one last time, before settling back against the pillows and plucking another candy from the bag, and Amy feels her fingers twitch looking at the purple ring on his cheekbone so she blurts out the first thing that comes to her mind.

“Thank you.”

She’s not sure what she’s expecting, but the sudden flick of his eyes to the bedspread, the crease of his eyebrows and the way his hands clench –

That’s not part of the script at all.

He shrugs, and clears his throat. “You did most of the work, Santiago.”

Amy feels her frown, still half-present from before, deepen.

“That’s not true. You’re sitting in the bed, aren’t you?”

He bites his lip and looks down at his hands. The purple ringing his cheek, coupled with the bulge of the candy still fitted into his cheek make for an interesting picture. His teeth worry down on his lower lip a couple times before his finger starts picking at the crisp hospital bedspread. Finally, he shrugs, exhales and looks up.

“I’m – it’s – I’m sorry,” he says finally, and immediately after he says it his face crumples into a weird sort of grimace. “Or – or whatever. For being kind of a dick.”

“What,” says Amy, mostly because she hadn’t thought Peralta was capable of _apologizing_ for anything, and even more so because she didn’t think he’d realized how genuinely frustrating he could be.

“Never mind,” he mumbles, shoulders sagging back against the pillows. “Just – yeah, anway. No problem, I gue –”

“I’m not going to submit the transfer request forms,” blurts Amy, and claps her hands over her mouth a moment later; _that_ had never been part of her script, either.

“What?” asks Peralta, eyes widening. He looks genuinely surprised, and there’s a renewed tension in his shoulders that’s very different from the awkward stiffness of a minute before. There’s a moment of silence, like they’re both holding their breath, and Amy stares at him with widened eyes of her own. Finally, Peralta’s eyelids flutter and he exhales, a sort of lopsided grin making its way onto his face.

“I’m not,” Amy repeats, her hands coming down and resting, taught and clenched, in her lap again. “I – I don’t know – I just –”

“It’s okay, Santiago,” says Peralta, his fingers returning to their previous pastime of picking at the bedsheets. He's constantly fidgeting, she realizes; even injured, he's jittery and restless, like he's seconds away from bouncing out of the bed. No wonder the Sarge had to pull rank. “I’d get kinda pissed off if I had to deal with me, too. And you wanna – wanna make Captain and stuff, one day, so.”

“Yeah,” says Amy, watching the movement of his fingers. A nervous laugh escapes from her mouth, shoulders still tense. “I could put it on my resume – handling Peralta. Like one of those pet projects or something.”

There’s another prolonged silence, and Amy's eyes move up from his fingers to stare at the bruise on Peralta’s cheek. He doesn't meet her eye.

“I didn’t mean that,” she finally says in a quiet voice. Peralta looks up at her, now, eyebrows still furrowed, and opens his mouth like he’s about to say something. His lips only purse back shut, though, and he exhales.

“It’s okay,” he says after a fashion, and even thought Amy _knows_ , both from context and from The Basic Rules Of Decency with which she’s been raised, that it’s _not_ – she gets the feeling he really means it.

“No,” she says. “That was a jerk thing to say.”

“It’s –“

“Peralta,” she says, and he looks at her and raises an eyebrow. Amy inhales and, for the first time in the past forty-eight hours, it feels, really thinks about what she wants to say. “You’re … you’re a good cop. And an – an okay partner, I guess, when you want to be, and –” _And a decent guy_ , supplies her brain. “And I want this to work out,” she finishes, clasping her hands together where they’re sitting in her lap.

He grins at her, then, a little less lopsided than last time. “Me too, Santiago.”

“Right,” she says. There’s an odd lightness in her chest; something gone that’s been hanging around for the past several months.

“So,” he says. “Truce? Start over?” An exaggerated eyebrow raise, his voice dropping to a ridiculous decibel. “What _are_ we.”

(And she really means to be _all business_ , now, that they’ve settled this. But –)

“Thanks for having my back out there, Peralta.”

His face smooths back to normal – almost in surprise, she notes.

“You too,” he says, and when he smiles, it’s one that she’s slowly becoming used to: wide-lipped and strangely sincere, as though he’s genuinely happy that she – that she _exists_. “That kick you gave him, man. That was totally the most badass thing I’ve ever seen, except for maybe all of _Die Hard_ and probably Rosa. But like, still pretty badass.”

Amy laughs, feels her eyes crinkle up with a mirth that’s been missing from the seemingly endless past couple days, and presses her hands into her thighs.

“Toss me a candy,” she says.

“Nuh uh,” says Peralta, wrapping his arms possessively around the candy package. He tries to pull a face at her but winces, his bruised eyelid twitching. “ _Ow_ ,” he mutters under his breath, and she feels the corners of her mouth stretch even wider.

“You’re an idiot,” she says again, and he sticks his now-purple tongue out at her. He’s not laughing, not quite, but his eyes are sparkling again – that warm light in them is back, and Amy wonders if maybe it’s not such a bad thing, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> some things to note:  
> \- i usually dislike writing the Leery Badguy Trope, but it seemed ... natural? here? I wanted to establish that Jake's reaction wasn't one of protectiveness, but of partnership. hopefully that came across alright (ew, writing), the realization of the reader happening in tandem with Amy's  
> \- I like to think that Jake and Amy's relationship was a lil rocky at THE VERY BEGINNING, not ONLY because their priorities seemed to be different, but because Jake didn't quite trust Amy, and Amy found that immensely frustrating and in turn couldn't find it within herself to take him seriously. Note that this is, truly, _very_ early on. A year in and they'd probably progressed to solid partners who loved to tease each other all the time and drove the Sarge up the wall  
>  \- (though, I bet that after Jake started really trusting Amy, he was constantly bedazzled by what a Cool and Badass Cop she actually was, only he compensated for the embarrassing amount of awe he had by instead yelling "NERD" at every opportunity he got. that makes sense, right?)  
> \- I don't know anything about police work outside of the show, so I really hope their taking down of the perps makes sense? WOO, suspension of disbelief, AMIRIGHT  
> \- thanks for readin' peeps


End file.
